Enter your loan balance, annual interest rate, and the amount you can pay each month. The tool shows how long it will take to become debt‑free and how much interest you’ll pay.
An 8,500 balance at 22.9 percent APR with a fixed 300 a month.
About 42 months — 3 years 6 months — and roughly 4,100 of interest.
On the example, 162.21 of the very first 300 payment is interest and only 137.79 touches the balance. That ratio is the clearest possible picture of what a high rate does, and it improves slowly: the further into the schedule you are, the more of each payment is doing real work. It is also why paying only slightly more than the minimum can take a decade — if the payment barely clears the interest, almost nothing is being repaid.
The total is calculated as payment × months minus the balance, which assumes all 42 payments are the full 300. In practice the final payment is a partial one, so the real interest is a little below 4,100. Treat it as an upper bound. The month count itself is exact, since it rounds up to the month in which the balance clears.
Every additional amount goes straight against principal and removes that money’s interest for every remaining month. Raising the example payment from 300 to 400 cuts the schedule to 28 months and saves about 1,400 in interest — a much larger effect than the 33 percent increase in the payment suggests, because the saving is on time as well as on rate. Run both numbers in the calculator before deciding what you can commit to.
It assumes no new spending on the account, a rate that does not change, and a payment that never varies. A promotional rate that expires, a card you keep using, or a variable rate will all move the real answer. For several debts at once, run each separately, then decide the order to attack them — highest rate first minimises interest, smallest balance first clears accounts fastest.
Enter the balance, the APR and the fixed amount you will pay every month. The answer assumes you add no new charges — continuing to spend on the card is the single thing most likely to make the real payoff far longer than the calculation.
Because it does not cover the monthly interest, so the balance grows rather than shrinks and there is no payoff date to return. The minimum viable payment is the balance multiplied by the monthly rate; anything at or below that never clears the debt.
Run it twice and compare. The saving is usually much larger than the extra amount implies, because every extra payment removes interest for all the months that follow. On the 8,500 example, going from 300 to 400 cuts more than a year off the schedule.
Highest rate first costs the least in total interest, which is the arithmetically optimal answer. Smallest balance first clears individual accounts sooner, which some people find easier to sustain. Both work; the one you actually follow through on beats the one you abandon.
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